Hey, I couldn't decide on a more appropriate forum to put this in, and I'm sure similar questions have been asked before, but I couldn't find any that applied to my situation.

I'm interested in making a Pokemon-clone MUD, mainly because I haven't seen anything out there that specialized in pet combat, and it's an interesting idea to me. Sure, many MUDs throw in pets, but I want it to be the focus of the game and the starting point, rather than an afterthought.

My biggest stumbling block when looking around for a codebase is I'd like to have a combination of Diku-style rooms, and a tile/overland/wilderness-style system. The trick is, I want both systems to be "true": I don't want wilderness to be dynamically generated room objects, but closer to a roguelike, and I'd prefer to have all the (reasonable) trappings of rooms, in separate areas (I'm thinking the difference between towns/cities and wilderness/caves/etc).

I have a passing knowledge of C++ and Java, but would rather pick up some scripting language at this point, and modularize the code, rather than writing the whole thing in one of those two. I'd also rather build from from a basic codebase (NakedMUD, etc) rather than ripping to shreds a highly developed one (SMAUG, etc).

At this point I'm leaning towards NakedMUD, but I was wondering if there were any other suggestions. Thanks.

but would rather pick up some scripting language at this point, and modularize the code

Welcome to MB Flelmo. :biggrin:

It seems like you want to do a lot of things at once here. Having specialized pet combat in a Diku mud doesn't seem that complex at all. What do you mean by modularize? Are you referring to modules as found in Python and Ruby?If so, I don't see how that is going to help you in developing a "tile/overland/wilderness-style system".

To do this well you have to write some pretty complex code, such as depth first recursion,which deals with graph traversal.

There are quite a few examples in the repository. If we were going to go with an existing base written in C / C++ then Lua would be a good move.But still, other than a bit of syntactic sugar, a map system isn't really the best application of a scripting languages' power.

Don't get me wrong, Python and Ruby are awesome, and I highly recommend using Ruby in particular.NakedMUD sounds like a good place to start, but I think you might need to hit the books. Have fun! :smile:

It's also worth clarifying that there's a difference between randomly generated on the fly, and randomly generated persistent worlds. You'll find that many MMO's randomly generate terrain until they find something that looks good to them, and then save that structure out to be hand-tweaked and fleshed out.

In this case, it sounds like you want the opposite of me. I prefer randomly generated areas to look just like normal rooms, and in fact, I'd prefer a game where the entire world is generated from a seed value and you can wander around as you like, hand-editing things as you find places of interest (which would then make them non-virtual).

I assume by non-room and roguelike, you want something that treats the "overland" as one big room and uses distance and/or line-of-sight to determine who sees whom?